The Crofter's Song - The Ray Woodruff Music Page

Sounds and Seasons

rjw — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:28:27 +0000

Even before coming out here from the towns and cities, from the packed tight residencies of my years before, my favorite times of the year – in time frames shorter than seasons, just a few days here and a few days there – were associated with sounds. For instance, when winter first comes in there is the low groan of the ice forming on a river. Or, as winter fades, the cracks of the break up of ice on the lake. Perhaps it is the feeling that the sounds bring an inevitability, that there was no turning back, that, with the subtle roar of the forming ice, winter has truly settled in. Perhaps it is that these moments come with a sense of intense, unusual quiet if it is still enough to feel the quick blasts of breaking ice, the moment has a serenity of its own that comes only with a sudden, broken silence.

So I have just returned from the forest and another of my favorite seasonal sounds. That moment with the forest becomes alive with moving sound. When, at the end of the fall, all the leaves are just waiting, yellowed with anticipation, for a light breeze, for only the slightest touch so gentil that the small human on the forest floor doesn’t even hear it, doesn’t even notice it… and then the leaves fall. In the thousands. Silent till they hit the ground. I am always amazed at how much sound they generate, one on each other, after their silent fall. It’s the sound of a thousand scuffling feet in the forest, surrounding, approaching, receding. It’s the sound of autumn slowly walking toward winter.

But today there was even more sound. As I walked the forest listing to the silent breeze turn to trampling leaves and taking the above picture I came upon a set of other feet. More lively feet. Connected to wings. I ran into a flock of close to two dozen wild turkeys. Unfortunately, I was too busy gobbling, laughing and shouting “Hell-ooo Turkeeeeeey!” to actually take any pictures of them as they all flew in slightly different directions in what I can only suspect was their confusion at my excitement. Made me terribly happy, though. A lovely way to see out the turn from the autumn of color to the autumn of grey…

For those who don’t know about my thing for turkeys, look back here.

Sherlock Holmes and Motown and the Digital Revolution

rjw — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 02:51:42 +0000

Ok, let’s, for a moment, talk copyright. And let’s, for a moment, talk shit and shinola. These two idea are becoming intertwined…

It’s been a lot of years now since the first shouted, wailed warnings came, first from the record companies over Napster and it’s kin and then the Movie corporations and their slaves over youtube, of the deep, terrible, vicious and profit maiming internet that had to be tied up and made profitable before everything just fell apart.

I’ve been fascinated at the shout outs and the bitching since this all started. I think it comes from just being of age to remember the last two times they did this – first, right at my adolescence, with the c30-c60-c90 fear that cassettes would ruin the music industry and then the slp,lp,sp fear that VHS would do it to the movie industry. If you could press a record button you could ruin the, or their, world, apparently. I’ve been most fascinated by all this because I remember quite well that, actually, these horrible revolutions in technology managed to make a shitload of profits for their respective industries once the idiots at the top of the corporate food chain managed to figure out how to harvest the formats.

Note, this is not a shitload of profits for the people how made the records/songs/scripts/movies. Most of those, particularly in the music industry, made nothing or less than nothing over those years. Most musicians don’t make anything off their albums if they are on a label. At all. In fact, in the 80′s, most of them went into debt to their label in making an album. But, in that same time of technological advance, the corporations made buko…

I have been wondering why these same corporations, now combined into even larger conglomerates, have NOT managed to pull in digital distribution in the same way. And I had a suspicion for a long time that was just confirmed tonight… It involves, quite fittingly, Sherlock Holmes. Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes.

Now, to regress for a moment: I like Guy Ritchie. Lock, Stock is one of my favorite films. You can watch it drunk and giggle and watch it stone sober and marvel at the build of the plot line, and still giggle. How many films can you say that about? Plus, it has a lead that makes a stunning Adam Ant. Snatch was pretty good, but floundered. And Ritchie had been, well, on a downward spiral since… So, when his version of Sherlock Holmes came out two years ago I just couldn’t… trust it. It looked impressive. I love Robert Downey Jr. But, well, the ex-Mr. Madonna had managed to shake me, convince me that I shouldn’t be so easily convinced. So I missed it…

I just caught it. Online. For free. From a seedy Czech site with a lot of ads for an accompanying video of the world’s smallest bikini (it wasn’t that small, it was just that what it was hiding was remarkably, and artificially, enhanced, but anyway…). It was excellent. A perfect vehicle for Ritchie. London underworld but bigger, more sweeping and more open to manipulation. I will be buying the DVD.

BUT, and here’s the point: if it SUCKED, I wouldn’t buy it. EVER.

I have always had the suspicion that the fear of the record and movie companies wasn’t that streaming would ruin their business but that it would take the ability to make a load of cash on a n-th rate crap product much, much more difficult. You can always pull off a single that sounds ok or a trailer that looks pretty cool, but if people are allowed to see the whole product before they buy you have to really put some effort in. You have to make it more than an album with one hit and a load of filler or a movie with all the good bits in the trailer. You have to invest in the maker and let them hone it, take some time, build up a following…. The big corporations fear of digital distribution was never really about sharing/downloading. It was simply that they don’t tend to make compelling products. They can make some damn compelling advertizing, but with digital distribution that is out of their hands. At long last.

And what a shame that’s all the big boys make anymore. Listen to the old Stax or Motown disks. All the long play disks were just a compilation of current singles. Everyone had heard everything on those disks on the radio before they came out. Quite a lot like streaming music today. And, man, there is nothing like those disks. And maybe never will be again. But being able to hear ever track on a disk or every chapter on a DVD gets us just a little closer.

A Cup of Forever at McSorley’s

rjw — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 22:18:53 +0000

Eternity. It’s something we, as humans, just can’t have a true idea of. We are creatures of the temporal. Of a moment. We are born. We begin. We die. We end. The perpetual, the Forever – that’s something for the beyond. Maybe we will experience it in that beyond, whatever that beyond may be, but for now we are of a time, of a place, of a moment.

Yet, we talk of eternity, we conceive of the infinite. Or, at least, we try. We, all of us I think, have some visual representation of the infinite. It might be the night sky high in the mountains where no city lights can reach and where, the deeper you look, the more layers of stars seem to materialize from the haze, layer upon layer of points in a seemingly never ending black. It might be the sea at twilight were, from the beach, you can not quite make out where the sea ends and the sky begins and the line between seems to go on forever.

For me, when I think of the Infinite, I think of one thing. Rural dirt roads in northern Indiana.

If you drive out into the corn, only a few good miles out of Mishawaka (my hometown), you will be in corn fields. Come to a crossroad. Stand. Look in any direction, choose a compass point. The road never ends. In any direction, the road never stops. It doesn’t just not stop – it doesn’t rise, it doesn’t fall, it doesn’t bend. You are the tallest point in the space of a pure rural geometry, a point from which four lines move off at right angles with little arrows at the end to show that they never, ever stop. They might fade at the horizon but, from that point at the intersection, it seems a failing of your eyes. They just can’t see, or can’t accept, that the road goes on forever. That is my infinite.

The new song, McSorley’s Gate, is a murder ballad set at a crossroads on those infinite Indiana roads. It’s available as a demo version here.

The lyrics:

So what’s all the dirt of your dirt road days

The lone dark road in the summer haze

An old Case knife in the lines of maize.

What did you carry to the hanging tree

Down past the brook in the hollow reeds?

A couple of tools and a bag of feed?

What did you do with the shovel and hoe

Dig a thin pit with your back all bowed

Fill it with a seed that would never grow

When I met you late

Past McSorley’s gate

When you kissed my face

Took me by the waist

When the head light turned

And the cold steel burned my blood to seed.

What do you give to your shelf to hold

A little beer stein of St Leopold

An ear of corn and a chain of gold

Is that what you gave your shelf to hold?

What do you say when the neighbors stop by

They bring cold beer and some chicken fried

“I like that creek, she’s never dry”

Is that what you say when the neighbors stop by?

So what’s out on your grass these days?

Past the rusted fence and the bails of hay.

Just an old worn path to a shallow grave.

Is that what’s on your grass these days?

Go

rjw — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 00:50:29 +0000

Or maybe Go If You Want Me – or Go If You Want… Something like that. Dunno yet.

But, for now, it’s just Go. A new tune. A tune with a pick in hand. Not the first pick tune I’ve written recently, but the first recorded.

First, the pick: A month or so ago Chapman Stick player Rob Martino stopped by 909 Saloon to check out Mike Dougherty and I playing some sets. As Rob and I both have a love for the old, acoustic Jethro Tull tunes, I had promised myself the next time he came by I would play one of the few that I can still remember (left over from the years before when I knew most everything Ian Anderson wrote for solo guitar and voice). He stopped in and I played Dun Ringill. A lovely tune and fun to play. So fun, in fact, that I started messing with a pick again. I find it keeps me a little simpler in my playing and a little more focused on the tune and less on the filigree.

As to why it’s the first new pick tune recorded… Well, I have taken to not recording any tunes as soon as I write them. I like setting them out live for a few months and letting them settle, letting the lyrics slowly, and sometimes ridiculously subtly, change, letting the guitar lines and solos solidify, and really deciding if I like the tune enough to bother recording it at all. I have several new tunes wating for me to bother putting them down on tape, or hard disk, or flash card, or whatever. This tune, however, was written, start to finish, with my wife sitting behind me – from the point I put the tune down on tape with a mumbled half English, half gibberish lyric over the melody to the last word down on paper, she was sort of following along. Normally I’m much more monastic in my writing than this. I’ve even thought of building a writing shack down the hill at the edge of the Croft’s land (an oil lamp, a cast iron stove, a tin roof, you know the drill – basically a chicken coop with less frills). But this time she was there for all of it. So she has kind of claimed it. And she wanted a recording. Oddly, this also means that, do to her interest in the process, I have thought a lot more about how this song happened and the were’s and why’s of the story than just about any song I have ever written. I shall spare you that mess, however.

It is a tune that encompasses one of my most prominent themes: restlessness in and escaping from (or being trapped in) a small, mid-western town… I can’t imagine where that comes from.

I’ve already changed a few words since I recorded it yesterday, as the observant shall notice.

It is up at reverbnation as an exclusive download.

It’s been some years since I recorded anything as dynamic as picking a dreadnought can be so the recording is a little rough, a little clipped. Sorry about that. Consider it a bootleg.

The lyrics:

Down on the field

It’s fourteen to three and the lights look surreal

Dozens of shadows stalk each back on the line

Last year flew by

Now you’re looking to leave and give Indy a try

A small streets girl dreamt of wide streets all of her life.

If I run home

Get in the car and just leave you alone

A tear in my eye and my back to the stadium lights

It’s not the way

It’s not like you’d cry or you’d beg me to stay

Thank you so much for a typical Saturday night.

An old Ford Ranger

Twisting down a winding road

Chasing silence

Don’t make a sound, don’t let me know

I’ll be here for the night

And I’ll go

I’ll go if you want me to go if you want me to go.

So why be right

A Formica top table and red stained bar light

A cup of sweet coffee and you’re blowing smoke from your tea

I hoped you’d ask

Over that burger you’d drop your damn mask

“O won’t you come with me, bust out of this town and be free?”

Chorus

I’ll be here

The second best thing in your runner up year

Let me roll down this damn window and get me some air

The river flows

Let’s follow the Wabash and see where it goes

If only you’d ask me I’m sure I could manage, I swear…

Chorus

So what’s it worth?

A babe at our feet and fire in our hearth

I’ll go if you want me to go if you want me to go.

PS.: If a fit of nostalgia of how I used to work, I recorded a full band version of this tune. It is, however, not likely to ever see the light of day…

A Week of Extremes

rjw — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 23:14:48 +0000

An earthquake, a major storm and a hurricane made last week an eventful week and a whole set of firsts for me. Never seen even the edge of a hurricane and never really felt an earthquake. I mean, we had an earthquake in northern Indiana when I was a kid but it wasn’t strong enough to feel. In fact, it wasn’t as strong as even the weakest of last week’s aftershocks.

But the land survived, the road survived and the creek grew high but didn’t threaten. We have a second crop of tomatoes in flower or growing green to yellow on the bamboo and twine structures I built before the storm, we have a dozen grape cuttings maturing in pots getting ready for next spring, we have a little Polish chicken laying her first little white eggs (the first white eggs from our flock, actually) and a dozen growing girls getting ready to lay in whites, blues, greens and browns. We even have a few little Polish and hopefully mixed Polish/Whatever eggs in the incubator ready to hatch in time to be ready to face the winter (we are cutting it close, but they should be fine).

So, with a few more tropical storms bearing down on the croft, here is an image from the end of last week’s stunning summer storm…

And in the calm between them, there are new songs to post. More on that very soon…

Swung High and Americana

rjw — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 03:48:20 +0000

Americana should be a loaded word. I actually find it odd, in this messy time of everyone and their elected representative claiming to be the only true American, that conservatives don’t even try to claim the word. It should, I suppose, be a word of the right. A word that could roam toward jingoism and chest thumping. But it has been usurped. It’s been stolen. It’s been taken over by us leftist, intellectual, pinko, long hair, chicken raisin’, land ploughin’, fox shootin’ (I can hope), Ford truck drivin’, hippy sombitches. God, how I hate ‘em. ‘Least we gots country music. Screw that Americana.

Kinda funny that country music had to rip off eighties hair bands and add a twang in order to stay hick, ain’t it?

However, MY problem with Americana is most of it seems to come out of New York City. We have us a whole lot of lads and lasses who picked up acoustic guitars after the obligatory punk band, listened to a tune or two by the Carter Family, listened to a whole lot of Mellencamp and Seger (Bob, not Pete) and Young, and started singing Americana…

So here I am. I don’t sing Americana. At all, really. I just like to steal from it.

And the new tune steals from the best. It’s not the best poem in the world. Not by a long shot. Not by a home run. It swung and missed, one might be tempted to say. But it is one of my favorite bits of true Americana. Casey At The Bat.

The new tune is a bit of a continuation of Casey At The Bat. After he blew it. After he swung and missed.

It’s also a bit of an anachronism. Casey At The Bat was published in 1888. But mine is a song of American loss and of the loser and for me, well, that always takes place in the 1930s. Actually, I don’t think that there is anything specific in my song that forces it to take place in the 1930s – but in my head, it does. And, I suppose, it takes place in Steinbeck’s ’30s. It’s the truck that screws it all up. You can’t drive outta town in 1888. I thought about trying to re-write the lyrics to not involve a truck, but then I decided, “Screw it. I like the truck. You gotta have a truck.” So the truck stayed in the song.

Oddly, my warn out truck broke down driving home after the gig I premiered this tune at. Funny that. But I suppose she made it out of Mudville, at least…

Anyway, Swung High is up here. The lyrics:

SWUNG HIGH

If I walk from that silent mine
Just a old fraud from the Mudville Nine
Well the road is wide
Black of lung and black of grace
I really don’t remember now how I found this place
Well, the road is wide

Found a dime and I stole a buck
Till I staggered out of Mudville in a worn out truck
That town is long behind
Where I glanced at the mound till I caught his eye
I swung for the moon and I swung high

Hit the road plaid Roebuck
The berries all bloomed like a white teacup
And the road was wide
I picked em all at a quarter a day
For every bag I filled there’s a bag I ate
And the road was wide

Summer come with a retching heat
My old ball cap and some beans to eat
With some time to bide
Steam blew and an axle bent
Radiator sings curbside laments
With some time to bide

The cold came and the leaves were brown
Stuck in West Virginia in a mining town
Put the road aside
One room and an iron stove
After twelve long hours in a darkened hole
Put the road aside

If I walk from that silent mine
Just a old fraud from the Mudville Nine
Well the road is wide

Blackberry Salsa?

rjw — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:40:22 +0000

Blackberries. That is what likes this land. Well, that and foxes. But mostly blackberries. By the hand full, by the basket full and in the preserve jar full. The wild blackberries on the edge of the forest seem to have mated with my domestic bushes last year and I now have seven foot tall not quite wild but, perhaps, barbaric blackberries lining the back of the chicken coop. They are bigger of berry and easier to pick than straight wilds, but more tart than most of the domestics. The bug eaten berries even make great free chicken feed. The chickens now group up against the fence of the run and beg the whole time my daughters and I are picking. I just started some cuttings in the hopes of a new blackberry run starting next year.

As for the other berry bushes, well… the blackberries look great. The raspberries keep stunting. I get a bunch of new growth one year and that dies back and new growth pops up the next. The blueberries get too much sun but, really, we just don’t have that much shade on this hill. And where there is shade, there are deer…

The garden, the ever expanding garden, my forest of tomatoes… that’s doing well. We are going to need some more interesting recipes for spaghetti squash. And salsa. And ketchup. And tomatoes juice. And bloody Marys. And anything else we can make with tomatoes.

The garden was set up to be tilled early in spring. I plotted it out thinking of tilling. I fenced it up remembering last year and the attack of the fresh-dirt-digging chickens. Everything was ready. But I couldn’t get the tiller running. I got two stuttering, hard fought, start and stop passes and then, nothing. So, late in the spring I decided to hand dig a small portion of it by hand. Then dug some more, then some more. Then, it seemed, everywhere I went I wound up getting free tomato plants. So I dug more. Finally, the garden managed to get about four-fifths the size I had planned to till. All dug and broken by hand. We are composting directly into the last, unplanned, section of the garden in hopes of fixing the tiller for next year. But even that is being encroached on by four sugar baby watermelons that are taking over any space they can find.

While I don’t think we are in much danger of achieving self-sufficiency and I don’t think Bloom is in any danger of loosing our business, it seems a step in the right direction.

The Urban Human and the Rural Fox

rjw — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:59:36 +0000

It’s funny how relying on small, defenseless (and slightly stupid) fowl for a part of your food can manage to make you re-assess your view of all nature’s creatures, great and small, feathered and fanged.

Now, we have slaughtered and eaten our roosters. We are used to death out here, we loose our hens on occasion to heat stroke, disease, being egg bound. We’ve lost baby a baby duck to a snake. The turkey to his genes. But it never quite hit me that, living this way, I would have to deal direct death to keep my flock alive. Or how much we have forgotten what a part of life dealing death once was.

It first started thinking about it after loosing several birds, mostly, but not all, quite young, to falcons and hawks. I love hawks. Always have. So I had never really needed to question the other side of the remarkably strict federal laws protecting birds of prey. You are not only not allowed to kill a bird of prey but you are not allowed to harass a bird of prey in any way. The consequence of so doing is a rather hefty fine or jail time or both. Pretty remarkable, since you can harass a fellow human with much less penalty. Anyway, it was only when I started loosing hens to them that I thought of how far we have gone from our rural roots. If we were still a country with small holders, if we produced any of our own food instead of going to the supermarket, the law never would have been passed. Certainly not as strict as it is. You CAN harass a bird of prey if it has attacked your animals, but the burden of proof is on the human and is extreme – seems you need photos of it personally killing your flock. I suppose you need to get a name, id, obvious characteristics and a mug shot to identify the harassed bird as the one in the photo to keep yourself from jail and bankruptcy…

And now we have a fox. Well, possibly two, but at least one. And we now have a flock that is half the size it was two months ago. Thanks to the fox. When I first started seeing him I tried my best to be a good soul. He’s a good boy, the fox. Plays with stray baseballs. That kinda thing. For months he has been around and I’ve tried to scare him, to detour him, to trap him, tried to be humane. And I was a little stupid. He wasn’t very good at hunting those several months ago. For instance, the second time I saw him, about four months ago, he strutted straight into the back yard toward the rooster. The Roo called all the girls to him and sixteen ticked off chickens marched on the fox. The fox would get down to pounce and the chickens would rush him and he would get scared and back away. He would crouch again and the chickens would all rush him again. This continued several times till I went out and scared him off for good. Well, for good that day. He wasn’t very good at finding cover months ago. Now he is. He wasn’t very good at catching the girls months ago. Now he is. At first he took to dragging the hens past the traps I set for him and into the forest. Such contempt. We caught possums, we caught raccoons. But not him. And I can’t get him. Now I hardly see him. Never, until it’s too late. I spend a heck of a lot of time hunting this damn thing. We can’t let the chickens free range anymore.

Had I let myself take him out when he was bad at this, I would have a lot more time, and a lot more chickens…

Feeding Foxes

rjw — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 14:00:09 +0000

The past month has seen a drastic reduction in chickens. Well, full grown chickens. We added a dozen pullets but they have months before they will be laying. As to the loss of laying hens, we have at least one, probably two, possibly three foxes hunting on The Croft’s hill. I have a bad feeling that we are the point of confluence for several different den’s hunting grounds. One comes up the hill from the hollows below (a very good, effective hunter), one over the hill behind us (a not very effective hunter and a little clumsy), and, maybe, one coming across the land of the house next to us (kind of shy and, I think, harassed by the people who live to the south of us to the point of paranoia). I have this terrible vision of the great armies all meeting in one spot like the end of a great Tolkien epic. We have lost four hens in the past month or so. We have traps out, covered and all camouflaged all pretty-like. All they have netted me so far is a very confused possum and a very bored raccoon.

The three remaining Polish chickens (one was lost to the fox) are growing well and, um, hopefully one of them is a hen. Hopefully.

The storms of the past month have done wonders for the garden plot. A series of violent storms, climaxing to the longest sustained hail storm I have ever seen (let alone stood under the roof of a chicken coop during), let my rather late planted seeds burst into rather respectable looking plants in very little time. I’m seeing the first tomatoes and the corn is getting tall enough for the beans to start climbing the stalks. Considering I could never get the gigantic beast of a tiller going this year and had to dig and break the ground by hand, it looks pretty good. It’s a mishmash of rows and clumps of mystery tomatoes and squash and melons that grew out of the compost we shoveled into the garden.

The blackberries (both wild and domestic) and the blueberries are finally starting to turn and some small, green balls of grapes are on the vine and the top of this hill look… well, productive.

The Way You Don’t Wear Your Hat

rjw — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:16:50 +0000

It has been up for about a week or so now but, given new coop building and creek rerouting and all the flowering of spring, I am just now getting around to posting something about it here. The Way You Don’t Wear Your Hat (Live) is up at the Bandcamp site. This is my first live album in many years of passing around recordings (on cassette originally, if that gives you some idea of how many). A live album was never really an option all those years ago in my “great wall of sound” days and, let’s face it, I don’t often play enough gigs to pull together a good recorded live set. Last month saw a few gigs back to back and this is pulled from two of them. Most of the recordings are a combination of a board recording courtesy of Rob Martino mixed with the stereo mic off my camera. They sound fairly good (and, like most of my stuff, sound better in headphones). The last few songs – including a song that is, until now, unrecorded – are just pulled from the mic on the camera but up close to the PA. They don’t sound quite as clean but I tried my best to mix them to match the others somewhat.

This was all an experiment, really. I haven’t been recording lately. It’s just a pain to bother setting up mics and mixers and all that good stuff. Once upon a time I loved all that but the whole move to solo acoustic several years ago now was to get away from wires, from cables, from computers. I have thought the best way for me to record would be live for quite some time. So this was a bit of fun to see how it would go, to see how well I could stand not having a second take to cut to when I blew a guitar phrase, to see how good the guitar would sound missing it’s ‘woody-ness’ and having to rely on a pickup for all its sound. It was also an experiment in mixing. Again, I’ve never produced anything live (at least, other than “live” in the studio), so the lack of control and lack of close miking (I really dislike that spelling of “micing,” but, apparently, it is correct) is totally new to me. I’m still not sure I pulled it off…

The previously unrecorded tune is “Sigh.” It has been kicking around in the live set for several months now. As mentioned above, all of the recordings come, to some extent, from a camera mic. The video of these performances (usually with a bit more chat and banter) can be found on the web, mostly on Youtube.

The cover of the album (and, thus, the name) is a reversion back to my days of cutting and manipulating old Victorian woodcuts to create covers. This was one I always liked but never used. The name of all the albums with the woodblock collage artwork is just the working title of the artwork itself – it has little to do with the music.

And finally – as with so many of my recordings – this one comes at a change… A minor one but one that takes some retraining for me. I am working at putting away the chair, adjusting the strap and standing up live again. Ain’t no point in staying still….

The Way You Don’t Wear Your Hat is available as a pay what you will (including paying nothing – go for it, I won’t mind a bit) album at Bandcamp.